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If it is just one image, is it a comic? Scott McCloud, a famous cartoonist and comic scholar, says no. He expels single panel works, for instance comics found in the New Yorker or works akin to The Far Side. But is this fair? Perhaps under the strict definitions of sequential art…

“Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Is this the best definition? Probably not, but it isn’t half bad either. But the key word in the definition is “juxtaposed” In The Far Side, the images are not juxtaposed because there is only one image. Lets look at this comic for example.

Here we see a single panel (at first, we will exclude the captain at the bottom from our reading), with dogs running around, repeatedly exclaiming, “Hey!” In the foreground, we have a man who appears to be a scientist wearing some sort of electrical contraption on his head. As is, we could make a variety of guesses as to what’s going on. Is his contraption making the dogs go wild? Perhaps it is emitting a particular pitch much like a dog whistle. I won’t try to sustain this mystery any longer, because I didn’t photoshop the image to exclude the caption, so you probably already know what is going on.

But with the added caption, we now know that the scientist is listening to what the dogs are saying and I think he is less than ecstatic to hear the mundane word repeated non-stop.

So the caption is critical in the understanding of the comic, yet it’s still not a comic to McCloud’s definition. However, we know for a fact that The Far Side is one of most celebrated comic strips ever, only sitting behind the likes of Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.

I propose that the caption is an image in and of itself. Sure, it isn’t pictorial (I suppose you can go into a lengthy debate of why it is, but I won’t do that here for I am unprepared for such a task), but it juxtaposes with the panel perfectly, not only explaining the panel itself, but also adding depth to the emerging form created by the unification of words and pictures. From the caption, we get a glimpse of the past, when the scientist was excitedly building this contraption and the caption along with the picture tells us of the present.

In other words, the caption adds such a unique depth to the singular panel, that it’s hard to suggest this isn’t a comic. Perhaps you can compare this to a photograph with a caption explaining the photograph. But it isn’t, for there are speech bubbles and the specific use of the word “hey” is absolutely crucial to the joke. You are never going to convince me that you can see speech bubbles floating above dogs in un-tampered photographs.

It’s strange to me that McCloud feels the need to define a comic in such a fashion. Perhaps the most critical medium it needs to differentiate itself from is the storyboard, but this definition doesn’t exactly do that, for the differences between those two mediums is far subtler.

To me, comics have always been a very fluid medium. Web comics have incorporated moving images or scrolling effects. Perhaps this definition doesn’t work, for it seems to exclude the masters of the simplest of comic forms – the one panel punch line.

Any college student is familiar with the word ‘procrastinate.’ I’m not going to pretend my habit of procrastinating and doing projects/essays/readings the night or even the morning before they’re due is unique to me, because I know most of my friends have this same issue. But I do get really frustrated with it, and I want to write about it.

Oddly enough, the biggest problem for me is reading. As an English major, most of my classes involve reading, and somehow that’s harder to get done than most of the assignments in my other classes. In the required natural science, foreign language, and math classes I’ve taken, I’ve had no problem getting the work done; I remember cranking out solutions to equations in high school math. There’s something steady and mechanical about getting math or science homework done, about answering defined questions until there are none left.

Reading assignments have similar end goals, so it shouldn’t be so hard. When I’m told to read the first 190 pages of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, it seems easy. But there are a lot of problems. I tend to underestimate how long it’ll actually take to get through the readings while actually paying attention to what’s going on and trying to understand everything (down to particular words I have to look up). And even though I’m a frequent reader, I’m not a fast reader, so that makes it even harder.

But it’s more than just the logical factors. There’s always something that causes me to think “Okay, this is what I’ll get done tonight—I have plenty of time to get it all done,” then blink 12 hours later and realize I read 15 out of the 190 pages. Or sometimes not a single page at all.

It’s like some compulsion, some sick anti-addition to reading, some sort of reader’s block. I can’t tell for sure what it is. Maybe it’s partly dependent on my enjoyment of the reading—two of the few books I actually finished for class this year were The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, two books I really loved—but it can’t be just that. Back in high school, whenever people said “I would like this book, but the fact that we have to read it for class makes me hate reading it,” I completely disagreed; reading The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men in class made me like the books more, because discussing them helped me learn what made them so special. But something has somehow changed a little in college, and I frequently find myself unable to read what I’m required to.

The worst part is that it’s not just being required to read, though. I haven’t read many books outside of class, either.

At first I thought that was because I was so busy reading for class that I didn’t want to read more when I had time to relax. Again, it is partly that, but that doesn’t account for all of it. I made it a goal for the New Year to read at least one book each month outside of class, but so far, I’ve failed miserably at that resolution. Reading increasingly just has this feeling to me of something that I have to prepare myself to do, something that requires an insanely focused amount of attention that I simply lack. I’m always thinking, always preferring to either cathartically release my stress-inducing thoughts by journaling or just kick back and watch TV or a movie, something that doesn’t require even the typing of keys or the willpower to keep going, because it plays on its own.

I could fix this if I made a conscious effort to just stop watching TV and movies for a while, even a couple weeks. I mean, after all, I still consider books my favorite medium of story. They directly place you in characters’ point of views in a way that most movies and TV simply can’t. I much prefer writing in a novelistic form over writing in screenplay format. And, as large as my movie and TV to-watch lists are, my list of books to read is far longer.

Yet I don’t want to forgo TV (the main medium that takes up my time—far more than movies), because it has something that books doesn’t to the same degree: timeliness. When a new episode of “Girls” airs, I want to watch it immediately so that I can read reviews, talk with people about it online, and generally just take part in the cultural conversation. I like staying timely with TV; at the bottom of my planner, below my daily homework obligations, I have a list of episodes from the week that I plan on catching up with as time allows. There’s a sense that I have to catch up on these various shows as soon as possible, especially when we’re in this period of ‘peak TV.’ There’s less motivation with reading—especially when so many of my friends are TV and movie enthusiasts.

Still, it feels wrong to be in this sad state of reader’s block, especially as an English major. It feels like I’m violating my identity knowing that right now, at this moment in time, I’d rather watch the newest episode of “Jane the Virgin” than read any of the books I’ve wanted to read. Hopefully, once summer rolls around, I’ll have more time to consume all kinds of stories—not just the ones that take the least effort to begin.

When I first started college I was a musician, not an engineer. I had little to no confidence in my ability to succeed within the College of Engineering, and only had applied the year before because my parents made me. It was the summer before junior year when I first began to think that not only could I be an engineer, but that I wanted to be one and it was my junior year when I finally found my home within the College of Engineering. That summer I had my first of three internships with BP America at the Whiting Oil Refinery in Indiana. It was that summer when I saw that there was more engineering than exams and homework sets that take a minimum 10 hours to complete. It was there that I saw that the work I do as engineer does not just effect the people I work or the company’s bottom line, but that it can impact each and every person living in Midwest whether they realize it or not. When I returned to school in the fall I was invited to join the EECS Honor Society HKN and I can easily say that electing was one of the best decisions of my college career. Finally, the engineering campus was no longer just a place I attended lectures awkwardly avoiding eye contact and constantly feeling out of place, it became a second home filled with friends and mentors with whom I didn’t mind pulling an occasional all nighter.

In the past five years I have a lifetimes worth of experiences and opportunities which would have been impossible to obtain anywhere other than the University of Michigan. I have performed in over 25 operas, musicals, plays and short films, served as Treasurer and then President of UMGASS (the oldest student run Gilbert and Sullivan Society in North America), attended the Petroleum and Chemical Industry Conference as a winner of the Myron Zucker Travel Grant, written a 20 page engineering analysis of the mechanical doll Olympia from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman, built an audio effects possessor, was a preliminary winner of the School of Music Theatre and Dance’s concerto competition and spoke to over 2,000 children around the state of Michigan about why STEM matters as a local title holder for the Miss America Organization.

I began college unsure of who I was and what I wanted to do with my life and was exceptionally lucky to have grown under the careful guidance of the faculty and staff here at the University of Michigan. While it was never easy, as we begin our careers we have an obligation to the community which fostered our growth. We have an obligation to those who feel that they don’t belong and who don’t believe that they can be successful. Freshman year that was me, that was my story and I fought each and every day to earn my place at the University, just as every other graduate. It is now our turn lead by example, expand beyond what is comfortable and prove to ourselves and to the world around us that we have earned the right to call ourselves Michigan Wolverines.